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The Brigantine: Celebrating 30 Years In Coronado

By The Underground Gourmet

Eileen Montgomery joined The Brigantine Family of Restaurants in 1979, just six years after owners Mike and
Barbara Morton opened their second Brigantine restaurant in Coronado. Now general manager of the bustling Crown City operation, Montgomery is ably backed by Chef Sergio Castillo, himself a 20-year veteran of the company.

Such longevity is unusual in an industry in which most new entries fail in three years or less. The Brigantine Family of Restaurants now counts 10 restaurants in the San Diego area, including six Brigantines, two Miguel’s Cocinas, Azul La Jolla and Zocalo Grill. At the time of writing a third Miguel’s was scheduled to open in Eastlake in January.

“We’ve become a fairly large company, but at the restaurant level there’s still a feeling of being a hometown business,” Montgomery said, explaining the chain’s enduring popularity. “We like the locals to feel a little bit of ownership. That’s true everywhere in our company, and especially here in Coronado.”

At the same location at 1333 Orange Ave. since its opening in 1973, the Coronado Brigantine takes pride in being the only full-service restaurant in town to serve food until, and sometimes past, 11 p.m. The bar stays open even later, routinely filling up after performances at nearby Lamb’s Players Theatre.

Originally a seafood place, the Brigantine has expanded its menu over the years to offer something for everyone. Dinner menu items that never lived in the water include New York steak, a pair of top sirloins known as the California Oscar, rack of lamb Dijonnaise and filet mignon with whiskey-peppercorn sauce. There’s also a breast of chicken sautéed with mushrooms, tequila and mild jalapeño cream sauce. And the famous Brig burger, offered only at lunch.

As with their seafood, the Brigantine buys meat from a small number of suppliers, thus making it easier to ensure quality and forcing suppliers to compete for the company’s sizable business. The due diligence is readily apparent in the wonderful rack of lamb, slow-roasted with an herbal crust and served with sherry-mint sauce. Hastily prepared lamb can be chewy and blunt, offering little reward for the mighty effort required to get it down. Not so at the Brig, where the medium-rare rack easily peeled away from the bone, impaired only by the hearty herbal crust; no dusting of greenery here. The filet is equally impressive, wrapped in bacon as a filet should be, charbroiled and served with a whiskey peppercorn sauce that compliments the meat’s robust flavor, rather than competes with it.

Seafood retains the numerical edge in the Brigantine menu, however. The restaurant took its nautical theme from the Shelter Island location of the first Brigantine, which is now a Miguel’s. Fresh seafood is delivered six days a week, with swordfish being a traditional specialty. Grilled and served with avocado-lime butter, swordfish is still the most popular dinner item on the menu, and it ought to be. This writer found it to be excellent. More impressively, this writer’s spouse got the last few bites as a cold leftover hours later and said the same thing. Less-than-fresh fish, even meaty swordfish, would have been reduced to a slab of indeterminate fishiness over that time. An odd endorsement, perhaps, but an honest one.

“A lot of it is in the preparation, but you have to start with the product,” Montgomery said. “We strive to bring excellent value to our customers.”

Other seafood entrees include coconut macadamia-crusted fried shrimp, calamari doré with caper and lemon beurre blanc, wok-charred ahi with wasabi-shoyu butter sauce, clam pasta, Alaskan king crab legs, pan-roasted king salmon and crown city shrimp, a dreamy concoction stuffed with blue crab, wrapped in
bacon and served on a bed of creamy jalapeño sauce.

The jalapeño cream sauce is also featured in the tequila scallops, one of the Brig’s bevy of appetizers.
Diners often request the recipe for the mild, subtle sauce, and they get it. The Brigantine cookbook is long out of print, but staff can pull up and print most recipes upon request. Traditional oysters Rockefeller, with ample spinach and parmigiano, were right on. The only non-seafood appetizer on the menu are smoked chicken taquitos in — care to guess? — jalapeño cream sauce.

“People always ask us what’s in our jalapeño cream sauce,” Castillo said. “It’s one of those things that’s just a little different.”

All desserts are made in-house, including an exceptional pumpkin pie cheesecake that probably won’t be available by the time this story goes to press, and a very nice creme brulée topped with fresh fruit that most
certainly will be. The pumpkin pie cheesecake, very seasonal when this article was researched, was unmistakably redolent of pumpkin pie and cheesecake, but lighter than either, making it a refreshing capper to a hefty meal. If your server offers “fill-in-the-blank cheesecake,” probably an appropriately seasonal twist, you have this writer’s assurance that it, like the rest of the Brigantine menu, won’t disappoint.


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